Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and may provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities.
Portable electronic devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and ease of portability. Smaller devices are generally desirable for portability. A touch-sensitive display, also known as a touchscreen display, is particularly useful on handheld devices, which are small and have limited space for user input and output. The information displayed on the touch-sensitive displays may be modified depending on the functions and operations being performed. With continued demand for decreased size of portable electronic devices, touch-sensitive displays continue to decrease in size.
That said, physical keyboards (as versus a virtual keyboard presented on a touch-sensitive display) are also in demand. Many people find physical keyboards to be easier and/or more accurate to use than a virtual keyboard. Providing a given device with both a touch-sensitive display and a physical keyboard, however, often forces a compromise with respect to the overall size of the apparatus and/or the size of one or both of the display and the keyboard. One design approach separates the device into two housings with one housing having the display and the other housing having the physical keyboard. While a helpful approach in many instances, again, many compromises regarding the relative size of these components and/or ease of use are often required. In addition, many such approaches tend to be mechanically and/or electrically complicated, fragile, and/or expensive to implement.